Lună: Septembrie 2015

„We are going through a very paradoxical situation. There have never been so many images. We are bombarded with thousands of them daily, without mercy and without warning. And most of them ask us to consume, consume, consume. So how does an image of pain survive in the sea of consumption? It doesn’t.”
– Alfredo Jaar

“The less time we have and take to read or decode images (thereby ‘spending words’), the less we will get out of them (as they become ‘smaller’), and, paradoxically, the more power they will have over us.”

Frederick Sommer, 1962

Strauss reminds readers that the act of looking is never straightforward, uncontaminated, or easy, while establishing that photography not only serves various agendas but also counts agency among its strengths. Indeed, Words Not Spent Today presents an argument for choice in contemporary photographic culture: we can still choose how to be governed and what we can change.

brilliant article on David Strauss’ book by my friend Ileana Selejan here.

I’ve thought of the lineage of music that goes way into the past and the future of music, which we hope will go into the future, and where does my life fit into that? I think just expressing it that way: What is the meaning of an artist’s life? Or of anybody’s life? A doctor’s life, a teacher’s life, or a radio interviewer’s life — what is the meaning of that? I’m more and more coming to the idea that it’s the lineage and the connection to the past and the connection to the future — that is the real connection. Everything else, I think, is kind of imaginary. Is there a heaven that is waiting for us or some afterlife of some kind? We have no idea. In fact, it’s not even important.

The important thing is how [you are] connected to the past. Does that represent not only continuity, but does it bring us closer to something that’s richer, that’s more interesting? What have we brought to the world and what do we leave behind us and what does the future have for us? The future … is in our children. It’s in our friends. It’s in our work. It’s all around us.

I find that the most reassuring when we contemplate living and dying, that [it] really misses the point: It’s not the living and dying, it’s the continuity of the lives that’s important.

„A few years ago, a woman I know, about my age, told me about a memory she had from her childhood—a vivid memory of her mom, more than once, standing out in the backyard, hanging diapers on the line to dry, and weeping. At the time, my friend didn’t understand this behavior, but later, when she became a mother herself, she figured that her mom was experiencing the sense of despair that sometimes overcomes a mother whose life is severely restricted by the needs and demands of small children. Today, of course, many more women have careers outside the home, which means they get to experience the sense of despair that sometimes overcomes a mother who must spend long periods of time separated from her young children. It is SO much easier to be a guy.”

Temper tantrums can be defined as a desperate expression of rage against a perceived state of helplessness. The person experiencing a temper tantrum, whether age 2 or 60, strikes out toward others, whatever the eventual consequences, because doing something is better than tolerating the enormous pain of feeling helpless and impotent.

All of us get angry, and express that anger, sometimes. The difference between expressing anger and having a temper tantrum is that a bona fide tantrum is an excessive, irrational reaction to a situation, which the person cannot control.